Ray Stanton, 58, retired Ohio State Highway Patrol trooper, had been propped against the split rail fence of the county fire department’s beer garden fundraiser for 47 minutes, counting the seconds until he could make a polite exit and go home to his leftover meatloaf and old John Wayne westerns. The fundraiser was the first of the year after the county commission slashed the fire department’s operating budget by 30% last spring, leaving them short on new turnout gear and a replacement rescue truck, and his buddy Mike had dragged him out, saying moping around the house was turning him into a hermit. Ray hadn’t had the energy to argue. The July air hung thick and sweet, heavy with the smell of charcoal, fried bologna sandwiches, and freshly cut grass, crickets starting their low hum in the oak tree line behind the cornhole courts. He nursed a lukewarm Pabst, the can sticky under his calloused, scarred fingers, and watched a group of teen boys argue over a bad toss, golden hour light gilding the edges of their faded baseball caps. His biggest personality flaw, the one Karen, his late wife, had teased him about for 32 years, was his rigid, unearned loyalty to people who never deserved it, clinging to arbitrary “codes” even when they left him alone and miserable.
He didn’t see her coming until she tripped over the edge of a rolling cooler half-buried in the grass, stumbling straight into his chest. His free hand shot out automatically, years of patrol muscle memory, curling around her elbow to steady her, and he felt the warm, soft skin of her forearm under the thin cotton of her sunflower print dress, the faint scent of lavender and lemon seltzer wrapping around him before she even spoke. She laughed, a low, throaty sound that made the back of his neck prickle, and brushed a strand of auburn hair streaked with silver out of her face, freckles across her nose crinkling when she looked up at him. “Sorry about that,” she said, grinning and nodding over her shoulder at a man in a neon fire department t-shirt hitting on a 20-something volunteer at the beer stand. “I’ve been dodging my ex for 20 minutes and I stopped watching where I was going.”
Ray recognized her instantly. Clara Bennett, ex-wife of his former patrol partner Jake, the man he hadn’t spoken to in 12 years, not since Ray wrote Jake’s 16-year-old son a DUI after he crashed Jake’s pickup into a downtown fire hydrant. Jake had called him a traitor, spit the word in his face in the station parking lot, and Ray had cut him off cold, stuck to the unwritten bro code he’d lived by his whole career, even when Jake had thrown every last bit of that loyalty back in his face. He’d seen Clara in passing a handful of times over the years, but never close enough to talk, never close enough to notice how her green eyes glinted when she smiled, or the tiny scar on her left cheek from a horse riding accident she’d mentioned once at a station potluck 20 years prior.
They talked first about the fundraiser, then about the small town library she’d run for the last 8 years, then about the divorce, how Jake had cheated on her with a 28-year-old dispatcher, how she’d left him three months before Karen had gotten her terminal ovarian cancer diagnosis. Ray didn’t mean to keep talking, but she listened when he rambled about Karen’s tomato garden, how the plants were still coming in even though he forgot to water them half the time, how he’d avoided any sort of romantic connection for three years because it felt like he was cheating on the memory of the woman he’d loved most of his life. She nodded, didn’t push, didn’t offer the empty “it gets better” lines everyone else had fed him since Karen’s funeral. They sat down at a splintered pine picnic table, their shoulders brushing every time someone walked past, her knee knocking his when she leaned in to ask a question, her hand brushing his when she passed him a crinkly bag of salted peanuts. He fought the pull the whole time, his chest tight with that stupid, ingrained loyalty to Jake, to the rules he’d built his whole identity around, even as every nerve in his body lit up when she laughed at his bad joke about the time he pulled over a guy driving a riding lawnmower down Main Street at 2 AM.
They left the fundraiser 15 minutes later, skipping the raffle drawing Mike had begged him to stay for, walking slow down the dark gravel road to where his beat up 2012 Ford F150 was parked a block away. Fireflies blinked around them, the distant sound of the band fading behind them, the cool night air raising goosebumps on his arms after the sweltering 92 degree day. He opened the passenger door for her, and she paused before she climbed in, reaching up to brush a strand of gray hair off his forehead, her thumb brushing the corner of his mouth soft, like she was testing the waters. He leaned down, kissed her slow, the taste of her cherry hard candy and the root beer she’d switched to mixing with the faint bitterness of his beer on his tongue, his hand resting light on her hip. She smiled against his mouth, her hands curling in the front of his faded patrol department jacket, and when she pulled back, she didn’t say anything, just climbed into the truck, leaving the door open for him to follow. He stepped off the curb, boots crunching on loose gravel, and slid into the driver’s seat, the warm air from the truck’s idling vents wrapping around both of them.
